Sunny Outlook From NAACP Board: Debt Gone, Membership Rising

After more than two years of controversy over its leadership, direction and finances, the NAACP has completely retired its debt and is rebuilding, the nation’s oldest civil rights group said Saturday.

“The NAACP for the first time is operating in the black,” said President Kweisi Mfume.

Just one year ago, the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People was struggling with $4 million in debt and still searching for a replacement for fired Executive Director Benjamin F. Chavis Jr.

“It’s like night and day,” board member Leroy Warren said Saturday as the group ended its annual three-day board meeting.

“It’s like one day you’re on a respirator, the next day you’re fighting Mike Tyson.”

“We refuse to be an asterisk in somebody’s history book about ‘once upon a time in the 20th century there lived a great organization.’ We want to make sure we’re there in the next century,” Mfume said.

Since he assumed his office in February, Mfume, former head of the Congressional Black Caucus, has spent much of his time revamping the 87-year-old association’s organizational structure and controlling its spending.

Chavis was fired in August 1994 for committing more than $330,000, without board approval, toward settling a sexual discrimination lawsuit filed against him by a former NAACP employee.

Mfume gave the board a balanced budget for 1997, with a revenue estimate of $12.6 million against anticipated expenditures of $11.7 million.

Mfume said he plans to build reserves to avoid debt crises and wants to establish a $50-million endowment for the NAACP, raising $10 million a year for the next five years.

The former Maryland congressman also said the group’s membership is climbing again, but he wouldn’t give specific numbers.

Board members said the organization is ready to return to the business of civil rights.

“We’ve got more vision as to what’s going to happen to the NAACP,” said the Rev. Raymond Scott, president of the group’s branch in Port Arthur, Texas.

“There’s a sense of relief that we are back on course,” said Ben Andrews, president of the NAACP’s Connecticut conference. “We feel good about our future.”